Musical Works

Selected listing of my catalogue. Includes: scores, recordings, source code, programme notes.

Names of performers refer to the recordings presented.

I am often unable to post information about pieces until several months after the première, so if you want information on a score that is not available here, please contact me directly.

Performance/study materials are available through the Canadian Music Centre.

Table of Contents

Orchestra
and Large
Ensemble
Chamber
Recycled 80s Live (2008) sop, pno, keys, drums
Jackhammer Lullaby (2008) flt, clar, perc, pno, vln, vc
Community-Normed (2008) flt, clar, perc, pno, vln, vc
Culture no.2 (or, Shoot Like a Film Star) (2007) pno + vox, pno + vox, perc + vox
Five Reflective Fragments (2006) pno + vox, perc + vox, str quartet
Short/Long (2005) tbn, pno, perc, laptop
Solo/Duo
Texting and Driving (2007–2008) gtr
Shit Around The World (2007) flt + vox, perc + vox
Culture no.1 (2006) harp, pno + laptop
Flüsse-Einflüsse (2005) accord
Obatalá (2003) pno
Learning Curve (2002) pno
Vocal
Kiss Around the World (2009) sop, vln, b. clar, pno
Béni est le lieu (2004) SATB
Opera Electronic
Culture no.1 (2006) harp, pno + laptop
Short/Long (2005) tbn, pno, perc, laptop
PartialGame (2004) laptop

Listen to all tracks in a separate window

Detailed Alphabetical Listing

Argument in Ternary Form (2003)

Instru­men­ta­tion: flt, vc
Dura­tion: 8’30
mp3 listen to Argument in Ternary Form
Per­form­ers: Flute – Julián Rodrigo, Cello – Kirk Starkey
Pro­gramme Note

The title of the piece is in ref­er­ence to an argu­ment between two of the composer’s friends, regard­ing the mean­ing of form in new music. The piece explores this ques­tion musi­cally: is it in ternary form or not?

Béni est le lieu (2004)

Instru­men­ta­tion: SATB
Dura­tion: 5’00
Pro­gramme Note

Community-Normed (2008)

Instru­men­ta­tion: flt, clar, pno, perc, vln, vc
Dura­tion: 16’00
Commissioned by the Continuum Ensemble
Per­form­ers: Continuum Ensemble, conductor: Gregory Oh
Pro­gramme Note

Only a small part of music is actu­ally about sound. The major­ity of music-making has to do with social inter­ac­tions more than any­thing else. Music ful­fills cer­tain func­tions (usu­ally pre-determined) within cer­tain social sit­u­a­tions, or serves as a replace­ment for var­i­ous social func­tions when we use it in pri­vate. There­fore, music can be said to be a community-normed phe­nom­e­non: what makes music music are the peo­ple who find a use for it, usu­ally by listening.

On top of that, the most use­ful (or best) pieces of music are gen­er­ally those for which there is the most con­sen­sus on usage: Beethoven’s ninth sym­phony and Michale Jackson’s album, Thriller are both “good” because a lot of peo­ple agree that they are good; i.e., a lot of peo­ple have found those two pieces of music use­ful for cer­tain social functions.

Any­way, these were some of the thoughts run­ning through my head while writ­ing this piece, and they influ­enced my choice and usage of musi­cal materials.

Culture no.1 (2006)

Instru­men­ta­tion: harp, pno, laptop
Dura­tion: 9’30
Per­form­ers: Harp – Ernes­tine Stoop; Piano, Laptop – John Snijders
Pro­gramme Note

Cul­ture no.1 is the first in a series of three pieces that deal with the chang­ing role of music in cul­ture, and I wrote it while work­ing on my Master’s degree at UC San Diego. The impe­tus for the piece was a series of four unre­lated sam­ples (and one deriv­a­tive sam­ple) that I found on my hard drive, left over from other projects. The sam­ples play at var­i­ous points in the music, and in one way or another, the instru­men­tal parts derive their mate­r­ial from them.

In Cul­ture no.1, I wanted to focus on sev­eral issues that I saw as par­tic­u­larly rel­e­vant to our rapidly chang­ing cul­ture milieu. These include an imme­di­ate and sim­ple pre­sen­ta­tion of mate­r­ial, clar­ity of pur­pose, the high­est pos­si­ble degree of sim­plic­ity in the orga­ni­za­tion of mate­r­ial, and musi­cal ideas that can live “in the moment”, with­out the need to ref­er­ence large sec­tions of the piece on mul­ti­ple lev­els. These are themes that have remained impor­tant to me since and have also fig­ured promi­nently in the sub­se­quent two pieces in the Cul­ture series.

When I first wrote Cul­ture no.1, I thought of it in terms of a dichotomy between pop­u­lar music and the West­ern clas­si­cal tra­di­tion. How­ever, in the sub­se­quent years I’ve tem­pered my inter­pre­ta­tion. I no longer see a con­flict between tra­di­tions, only a reflec­tion on the rit­u­als of music-making. It is also, to a point, a test­ing of cul­tural con­ven­tions par­tic­u­lar to the concert-music rit­ual. This focus on rit­ual and cul­tural con­ven­tion is what I think makes the piece suc­cess­ful in the end. I’ve got­ten a lot of strong reac­tions to Cul­ture no.1, from “incom­pre­hen­si­ble” to “mas­ter­piece”. For me, that kind of polar­iza­tion always speaks to the cul­tural res­o­nance of a work of art, and cul­tural res­o­nance is cer­tainly appro­pri­ate to the theme I wanted to explore.

Culture no.2 (or, Shoot Like a Film Star) (2007)

Instru­men­ta­tion: pno, pno, perc, performers’ speak­ing voices
Dura­tion: Vari­able, 3’00–15’00
Com­mis­sioned by Toca Loca with assis­tance from the Canada Coun­cil for the Arts
mp3 listen to Cul­ture no.2 (or, Shoot Like a Film Star)
Per­form­ers: Toca Loca: Gre­gory Oh – piano, Simon Dock­ing – piano, Aiyun Huang – percussion
Pro­gramme Note

This is the mid­dle piece in my Cul­ture series, which is an explo­ration of the effects that today’s cul­tural con­text has on mak­ing our music what it is. The text for the piece is taken from a junk e-mail mes­sage—cer­tainly among the more recent of lit­er­ary gen­res. It attracted me because it is com­posed entirely of mono­syl­labic words, with no rep­e­ti­tion; a kind of het­ero­ge­neous stream that strikes me as contemporary.

The mid­dle sec­tion of the piece is inde­ter­mi­nate or open: the per­form­ers decide how the musi­cal mate­ri­als will be pre­sented. This is also some­thing that I take from the Cul­ture theme, because the mul­ti­plic­ity of pos­si­bil­i­ties, end­less var­ie­ga­tion, and the impos­si­bil­ity of find­ing “right” answers seem to me impor­tant cul­tural prob­lems today.

Culture no.3 (2006 rev. 2008)

Instru­men­ta­tion: flt, clar, hrn, tbn, pno, perc, vln, vla, vc, cb
Dura­tion: 13’00
Com­mis­sioned by the Ensem­ble con­tem­po­rain de Montréal
Per­form­ers: Ensem­ble con­tem­po­rain de Montréal, con­duc­tor: Véronique Lacroix
Pro­gramme Note

Cul­ture no.3 is the last in a series of pieces that deals with the ways that mod­ern pop­u­lar cul­ture can inform West­ern art music. More specif­i­cally, Cul­ture no.3 is involved in explor­ing the inter­re­la­tion between the vis­ceral ele­ments of pop­u­lar music and tim­bre. By vis­ceral ele­ments, I mean, for exam­ple, the sense of motion, the force­ful­ness of the artic­u­la­tions, or the char­ac­ter of the rhythm or tempo, to name a few. The tra­di­tional pitch resources of the pop­u­lar sphere have required that vis­cer­al­ity and tim­bre play a greater role in defin­ing pop­u­lar gen­res (and sub­se­quently in deter­min­ing what we find inter­est­ing within them) than is seen in the major­ity of West­ern art music. Cul­ture no.3, with a greater empha­sis on tim­bre and vis­cer­al­ity and a sub­se­quently lesser empha­sis on other aspects of the musi­cal whole, uses the resources of the West­ern ensem­ble to fea­ture this aspect of pop­u­lar music.

Desde (2004)

Instru­men­ta­tion: orchestra
Dura­tion: 7’00
Pro­gramme Note

Desde was writ­ten in the sum­mer of 2004 and is my first orches­tral work. In sev­eral of the pieces lead­ing up to Desde, I had begun exper­i­ment­ing with ways of deal­ing with the prob­lem of cul­tur­ally biased musi­cal per­cep­tion, which colours all musi­cal expe­ri­ences. This came about as I com­pared my non-classical music edu­ca­tion with the for­mal expe­ri­ences I received in uni­ver­sity, and I wanted to find ways to com­bine what I felt at the time to be sev­eral often-conflicting meth­ods of hear­ing music.

Five Reflective Fragments (2006)

Instru­men­ta­tion: pno + speak­ing voice, perc + speak­ing voice, vln, vln, vla, vc
Dura­tion: 9’00
mp3 listen to Five Reflective Fragments
Per­form­ers: Piano – Luciane Car­dassi, Per­cus­sion – Fabio Oliveira, Vio­lins: Orin Hildestad, Chris Otto, Viola – Kim­berly Empeno, Vio­lon­cello – Emily Dufour, Con­duc­tor – Harvey Sollberger
Pro­gramme Note

Five Reflec­tive Frag­ments is based on a sequence of very brief text frag­ments extracted from a much longer poetic work, enti­tled I Lost Every­thing by poet Sarah Lang. The piece always presents this series of word-units in order and with­out over­lap. Each unit is spoken—not sung—at the begin­ning of a musi­cal ges­ture, and always by the per­former who is play­ing the ges­ture. Each unit is also repeated mul­ti­ple times.

I have decided on this approach in order to dis­tance the text from any fixed nar­ra­tive. The music instead pro­vides a space for these lan­guage objects to be observed in, and in which the lis­tener can choose to cre­ate or not cre­ate his or her own nar­ra­tive. Pre­sented in this mono­lithic man­ner and detached from the con­tex­tu­al­iza­tion of lan­guage prepo­si­tions, Five Reflec­tive Frag­ments sets up the oppor­tu­nity for a kind of mytho­log­i­cal reac­tion to develop around the pre­con­cep­tions of the lis­tener. The word-units com­bine with the music to cre­ate hints, but hope­fully hints that will take each lis­tener in a dif­fer­ent direction.

Flüsse-Einflüsse (2005)

Instru­men­ta­tion: accordion
Dura­tion: 7’00
Com­mis­sioned by Ina Hen­ning with assis­tance from Roger D. Moore
mp3 listen to Flüsse-Einflüsse — 1. Flussaufwärts
mp3 listen to Flüsse-Einflüsse — 2. Flussabwärts
Per­form­ers: Accor­dion – Ina Henning
Pro­gramme Note

Flüsse-Einflüsse is Ger­man for Streams-Influences. The con­cept of the con­ver­gence of mul­ti­ple streams of influ­ence is impor­tant to me, because I am a clas­si­cal com­poser com­ing from a jazz and pop back­ground. Sim­i­larly, the 2004/2005 DAAD Sound Under­stand­ing con­cert for which Flüsse-Einflüsse was writ­ten fea­tured both clas­si­cal and jazz per­form­ers. This idea of mul­ti­ple streams con­verg­ing is car­ried through­out the piece on sev­eral lev­els, from the mate­r­ial (taken from two of my favourite jazz tunes but reworked clas­si­cally), to the inter­ac­tion between per­former and com­poser (some sec­tions are writ­ten out, oth­ers are impro­vised), to the inter­ac­tion of reg­is­ters, tex­tures, and for­mal elements.

Four Pieces for Accordion and String Quartet (2003)

Instru­men­ta­tion: accord, vln, vln, vla, vc
Dura­tion: 22’00
mp3 listen to Four Pieces — I
mp3 listen to Four Pieces — II
mp3 listen to Four Pieces — III
mp3 listen to Four Pieces — IV
Per­form­ers: Accor­dion – Alexan­der Sev­as­t­ian, Violin I – Mary-Beth Brown, Violin II – Kata­rina Kin, Viola – Alex McLeod, Vio­lon­cello – Kirk Starkey, Con­duc­tor – Gary Kulesha
Pro­gramme Note

Four Pieces for Accor­dion and String Quar­tet was writ­ten between the sum­mer of 2002 and the fall of 2003. It was inspired by a series of poems called Swerve, by Cana­dian poet Sarah Lang. There are four poems in the series, which tell the story of a woman watch­ing her lover die of can­cer. Four Pieces is ded­i­cated to my grand­mother, Antoinette Schulte, who was an accor­dion­ist and died of can­cer when I was a child.

What inter­ested me about Swerve was the sen­sa­tion of the pas­sage of time con­veyed by the narrator’s emo­tions. I felt this had strong cor­re­la­tions with musi­cal form, and I wanted to try to trans­late the emo­tional form of Lang’s series into an instru­men­tal piece. There­fore, each poem in the set cor­re­sponds to a move­ment in Four Pieces, and each move­ment closely fol­lows the con­tent of the cor­re­spond­ing poem in Swerve.

Four Pieces was also my first suc­cess­ful attempt at the pur­pose­ful jux­ta­po­si­tion of dis­parate har­monic sys­tems. I wanted to be able to draw from a palette of func­tional and non-functional sonori­ties rang­ing from pop­u­lar music and jazz, to medieval, clas­si­cal, and twentieth-century West­ern music. I achieved this goal by plac­ing har­monic and melodic ideas in new local con­texts or by using the func­tion of one har­monic sys­tem with the mate­r­ial from another. Exam­ples include the osti­nato 6/3 chord in the first move­ment, trans­posed up a quar­ter­tone, and the func­tional cadence that ends the piece, dis­guised by dense pitch clus­ters and non-triadic sonorities.

Viñes Pass­ing Through
mp3 lis­ten to Viñes Pass­ing Through

A mash-up by Steve Lay­ton that uses Four Pieces.

Other sources: Ricardo Viñes – Menuet Spec­tral & En Ver­laine Mineur, Christ­opher DeLau­renti – Tiger, Sara Pee­bles – Music for Incan­descent Events Joseph Drew – He Was a Poet

Four Songs for Four Horses (2002)

Instru­men­ta­tion: sop, pno
Dura­tion: 10’00
Text by Emma Hooper, used by permission
Pro­gramme Note

Four Stills on Evaporation in Thirty-One Fragments (2007)

Instru­men­ta­tion: string quartet
Dura­tion: 8’00
Writ­ten for the Arditti Quartet
mp3 listen to Four Stills on Evaporation (excerpt)
Per­form­ers: The Arditti Quartet
Pro­gramme Note

This piece reflects my ongo­ing inter­ests in sec­tional forms, doing away with tran­si­tional mate­r­ial, and the chal­leng­ing of aes­thetic assump­tions. There is no attempt to relate any of the mate­ri­als of the piece over the large scale. Instead, I have focused on a broad ges­ture—that of a long dimin­u­endo—that goes from begin­ning to end. Within that ges­ture are a series of thirty-one frag­ments, some with local rela­tion­ships to adjoin­ing frag­ments, some with­out. No struc­tures or orga­niz­ing prin­ci­ples have been used that are not imme­di­ately appar­ent to the ear, and each sec­tion is com­posed intu­itively with regard to pitch, rhythm, tone colour, and phras­ing. The piece also includes sev­eral the­atri­cal ele­ments, and is there­fore best appre­ci­ated in a live performance.

Jackhammer Lullaby (2008)

Instru­men­ta­tion: flt, clar, pno, perc, vln, vc
Dura­tion: 7’00
Commissioned by the Continuum Ensemble
mp3 listen to Jackhammer Lullaby
Per­form­ers: Continuum Ensemble, conductor: Gregory Oh
Pro­gramme Note

Jack­ham­mer Lul­laby is an arrange­ment of Community-Normed, which was com­mis­sioned by the Con­tin­uum Ensem­ble in Toronto in 2008. I’ve become increas­ingly inter­ested in pre­sent­ing pieces in mul­ti­ple ver­sions and com­bi­na­tions. Jack­ham­mer Lul­laby, with a few changes, is also the mid­dle move­ment of Community-Normed. I’ve also writ­ten a third ver­sion, for a cham­ber music con­fer­ence in Ver­mont in July 2009, with dif­fer­ent instru­men­ta­tion and adapted for ama­teur performers.

Why mul­ti­ple ver­sions? Because music today is mul­ti­ple. Every­one is exposed to music from mul­ti­ple cul­tures all the time, from mul­ti­ple time peri­ods, and in mul­ti­ple ver­sions. DJs remix pop songs, which are avail­able in numer­ous ver­sions, and do mash-ups that inter­twine mul­ti­ple tracks in the space of a few sec­onds. I think this is a good way to deal with the fact that we are, for the first time in his­tory, drown­ing in more music than any­one knows what to do with. For this rea­son, cre­at­ing mul­ti­ple ver­sions is an impor­tant project of mine.

Musi­cally, Jack­ham­mer Lul­laby presents a humor­ous musi­cal set­ting of try­ing to fall asleep with con­struc­tion going on out­side the window.

Kiss Around the World (2009)

Instru­men­ta­tion: sop, vln, b. clar, pno
Dura­tion: 14'00
Commissioned by New Works Calgary and the Canada Council for the Arts, for Ensemble Resonance
mp3 listen to Kiss Around the World
Pro­gramme Note

Kiss Around the World was com­mis­sioned by New Works Cal­gary and the Canada Coun­cil for the Arts for Ensem­ble Res­o­nance. It is the sec­ond Around the World piece that I have writ­ten, tak­ing a sin­gle word—in this case kiss—and pre­sent­ing it in a wide vari­ety of languages.

The idea of kiss­ing takes on very dif­fer­ent con­no­ta­tions in dif­fer­ent lan­guages, and I wanted to find a con­no­ta­tion that was as uni­ver­sal as pos­si­ble. There­fore, in Kiss Around the World I decided to focus on the idea of the nur­tur­ing kiss, the kiss a par­ent would give a child. This was the most uni­ver­sal use of kiss­ing I came across. Roman­tic kiss­ing, which is what I ini­tially thought would make the best focus, is not uni­ver­sal. It did not exist in much of Asia before the arrival of the Euro­peans; Kore­ans and Japan­ese actu­ally use a mod­i­fied form of the Eng­lish word for roman­tic kissing.

Musi­cally, Kiss Around the World is made up of a series of short sound units, usu­ally one per word, that are arranged and devel­oped into a lyri­cal, flow­ing tex­ture. Being a com­poser obsessed with frag­men­ta­tion and con­trast, this was a novel and stim­u­lat­ing chal­lenge for me that grew out of the theme of the piece and the musi­cal mate­ri­als at hand. The result is a sooth­ing, gen­tle piece that has cer­tain aspects of a lul­laby, all the while employ­ing the collage/mosaic tech­niques that are the hall­marks of my style. There is even a lit­tle col­lage sur­prise at the end of the piece…

Learning Curve (2002)

Instru­men­ta­tion: pno
Dura­tion: 11’00
Pro­gramme Note

This is the ear­li­est piece in my cat­a­logue that I would want per­formed again. I orig­i­nally wrote the fol­low­ing about it:

This piece explores the process of learn­ing the “hard way”, which is fre­quently a painful jour­ney, but which in most cases ulti­mately leads to greater under­stand­ing, and per­haps in some greater hap­pi­ness as well.…

Love in the Time of Connectivity (2009)

Instru­men­ta­tion: sop, sop, m-sop, flt, flt, clar, alto sax, bari sax, hrn, trpt, tbn, tbn, tba, pno, elec gtr, bass gtr, drums
Dura­tion: 3’30
Commissioned by orkest de ereprijs
mp3 listen to Love in the Time of Connectivity
Per­form­ers: orkest de ereprijs, conductor: Rob Vermeulen
Pro­gramme Note

Love in the Time of Con­nec­tiv­ity is a col­lage. In fact, even the title is a col­lage: I took the title of Gabriel Gar­cía Márquez’s novel, Love in the Time of Cholera, and com­bined it with a ref­er­ence to the cul­ture of Inter­net file shar­ing. I have been inter­ested in col­lage and the reap­pro­pri­a­tion of mate­r­ial for some time, because as the say­ing goes, good artists bor­row but great artists steal. Col­lage is the most hon­est way to hon­our that prin­ci­ple, and I spent most of 2008 work­ing in this direction.

Col­lage, as well as related ideas such as sam­pling, remix, and mash-up, are among the few uni­fy­ing forces dri­ving artis­tic change today. Through video sites like YouTube and audio sites like ccMix­ter, these ideas have been respon­si­ble for renew­ing ama­teur art on a mass scale, for chal­leng­ing the stan­dards of cre­ativ­ity, for expand­ing musi­cal taste, and even for influ­enc­ing legal precedent.

For the first time in his­tory, we are drown­ing in art. There is too much music of the high­est artis­tic qual­ity for any­one to ever hope to expe­ri­ence. So how can artists con­tribute to cul­ture in a sit­u­a­tion like this? I think col­lage is an impor­tant part of the answer, and the proof is in the atti­tudes of those who grew up with the Inter­net. For many of them, art is not some­thing sim­ply to be expe­ri­enced, it is a resource to be adapted, changed, built upon, and shared.

While com­pos­ing Love in the Time of Con­nec­tiv­ity, I gave myself some restric­tions in order to inspire cre­ativ­ity. For exam­ple, I decided to try to present all quo­ta­tions in as rec­og­niz­able a form as pos­si­ble. I did not allow myself to trans­pose frag­ments from their orig­i­nal tonal­i­ties, and I did not allow myself to com­pose my own new mate­r­ial to bridge together the quo­ta­tions—every note is bor­rowed. I also made tempo an inte­gral part of the musi­cal devel­op­ment, and I tried to make gram­mat­i­cal sense of all the text frag­ments I com­bined. Finally, every quote relates to the oth­ers in some way, either in terms of theme, title, text, artist, or (obvi­ously) musi­cal sounds.

Nothing (2004)

Instru­men­ta­tion: flt, flt, flt, sop sax, alto sax, ten sax, bari sax, perc, perc, vln, vln, vla, vc, cb
Dura­tion: 8’00
Per­form­ers: Flutes: Emma Tessier, Annick Santschi, Emma Elkin­son, Sax­o­phones: Soprano – Tris­tan DeBorba, Alto – Rafal Kaczor, Tenor – Rob Mosher, Bari­tone – Jamie Wilkie, Per­cus­sion: Richard Bur­rows, Nicholas Jacques, Vio­lins: Kenin McKay, Marcin Swo­boda, Viola – Alex McLeod, Vio­lon­cello – Kirk Starkey, Double Bass – Mandi Byrd, Con­duc­tor – Aaron Gervais
Pro­gramme Note

Why call a piece Noth­ing? Well, in a word, curios­ity—most of my music has as its theme the ques­tion, “What hap­pens if…?” At the time I was writ­ing Noth­ing (win­ter 2004), I was both­ered by the almost total reliance on motivic devel­op­ment and form to gen­er­ate local and long-term inter­est in West­ern music. I won­dered if it might be pos­si­ble to “hear” some­thing as a coher­ent (and enjoy­able) piece of music with­out recourse to any for­mal or motivic rep­e­ti­tion. Hence, the title Noth­ing is a ref­er­ence to the cen­tral prob­lem of the piece: “What hap­pens if I have noth­ing (in the tra­di­tional sense) to con­nect with?”

I have since come to view this issue as a spe­cific case of the gen­eral prob­lems of musi­cal cog­ni­tion and our (largely) unques­tioned appro­pri­a­tion of orga­ni­za­tional par­a­digms devel­oped for and by eighteenth-century empiri­cism. Nev­er­the­less, the result remains the same, and as any­one who has tried to com­pose can tell you, hav­ing noth­ing is the same as hav­ing every­thing—there are end­less choices. So I had to find an alter­na­tive focus, and I decided to return to very basic meth­ods of hear­ing as a way of con­nect­ing musi­cal mate­r­ial. For exam­ple, instead of using melodic/harmonic motives, the open­ing of the piece uses a jux­ta­po­si­tion of pitched and non-pitched ele­ments to grab the listener’s atten­tion. Exactly which spe­cific pitched and non-pitched ele­ments are used is rel­a­tively unim­por­tant; the low-level con­trast between har­monic and inhar­monic sound spec­tra is what makes the music interesting.

Of course, this doesn’t com­pletely side­step motivic and for­mal orga­ni­za­tion, but it does push it back to a level that is gen­er­ally not dealt with exclu­sively. Motives and form become syn­ony­mous with tech­niques and mate­r­ial: pitched ver­sus non-pitched; rhyth­mic ver­sus non-rhythmic; these instru­ments together ver­sus those instru­ments together; and so on. Nothing is not the kind of piece that is inspired by sym­met­ri­cal pat­terns or pyra­mi­dal short-term/long-term inter­re­la­tion—there are con­nect­ing links, as demanded by musi­cal cog­ni­tion, but if you come look­ing for devel­op­men­tal strate­gies of that sort, be pre­pared to end up with a whole lot of nothing.

Obatalá (2003)

Instru­men­ta­tion: pno
Dura­tion: 1’00
Pro­gramme Note

This is a children’s solo piano piece based on the tra­di­tional Yoruban music for the deity of the same name, as prac­ticed in the Cuban San­tería tradition.

Partial Game (2004)

Instru­men­ta­tion: laptop, microphone
Dura­tion: Variable, 3’00–6’00
Pro­gramme Note

An inter­ac­tive sound game for audi­ence volunteers.

Recycled 80s Live (2008)

Instru­men­ta­tion: sop, pno, keys, drums (all amplified)
Dura­tion: 90’00
Made possible through the financial support of the Alberta Foundation for the Arts and the Banff Centre
Pro­gramme Note

Recy­cled 80s Live is a col­lage of small frag­ments of ‘80s pop songs, recom­posed and recon­tex­tu­al­ized into a new, larger work. I chose this approach because artists have always bor­rowed mate­r­ial from one another, but copy­right is increas­ingly being abused to pre­vent bor­row­ing. This sit­u­a­tion is a threat to cul­ture and cre­ativ­ity in gen­eral and it deserves to receive atten­tion. Addi­tional infor­ma­tion, sound clips, a promo video, and other details are avail­able on the project web­site.

Scene from Euripides’ Medea (2004)

Instru­men­ta­tion: sop, bari, flt, ob, clar, bsn, hrn, accord, vln, vc
Dura­tion: 12’00
Libretto adapted from the Greek tragedy (public domain)
Pro­gramme Note

Sensational Revolution in Medicine (2008)

Instru­men­ta­tion: sop, piano + voice
Dura­tion: 16’00
mp3 listen to 1. Sensational Revolution in Medicine
mp3 listen to 2. The Most Important Work of Your Career
mp3 listen to 3. One Hundred Seventy-Three Centimetres, Fifty-Three Kilograms
mp3 listen to 4. Dear User. Why Don’t You…
mp3 listen to 5. A Time of Resource
Per­form­ers: Xin Wang – Soprano, Gregory Oh – Piano, speaking voice
Pro­gramme Note

The texts for the five pieces in this set are taken from spam email mes­sages that I col­lected in 2006. I am attracted to the idea of using spam email texts because of what they rep­re­sent. Since the pur­pose of com­mer­cial spam is always to trick some­one into spend­ing money, these texts are always tar­geted at our most deep-seated fears and vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties. This makes them a pow­er­ful source of sub­ject matter.

Each of the five texts tries to exploit spe­cific vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties, described below:

  1. Sen­sa­tional Rev­o­lu­tion in Med­i­cine — Phys­i­cal infir­mity, fail­ure of con­ven­tional treat­ments, lack of hope.
  2. The Most Impor­tant Work of Your Career — Job dis­sat­is­fac­tion, appeals to authority.
  3. One Hun­dred Seventy-Three Cen­time­tres, Fifty-Three Kilo­grams — Lone­li­ness, lack of social inter­ac­tion, lack of roman­tic opportunity.
  4. Dear User. Why Don’t You… — Lack of self-confidence, prob­lems with body image, lust.
  5. A Time of Resource — Greed, feel­ings of miss­ing out, peer pressure.

She said you meddle. I dare you. (2003)

Instru­men­ta­tion: sop, vln, vla, vc, bari sax, drums
Dura­tion: 8’00
Text from Mobile by Sarah Lang, used by permission
Pro­gramme Note

Shit Around the World (2007)

Instru­men­ta­tion: flt + voice, perc + voice
Dura­tion: 11’00
mp3 listen to Shit Around The World — I
mp3 listen to Shit Around The World — II
mp3 listen to Shit Around The World — III
Per­form­ers: Flute – Solomiya Moroz, Percussion – Nicholas Jacques
Pro­gramme Note

This piece is based on the sound of the word shit in twelve dif­fer­ent lan­guages. It trav­els from west to east geo­graph­i­cally across the world. The lan­guages were cho­sen either because I speak them, or because I could find a native speaker of that lan­guage to teach me how to say shit. I did, how­ever, attempt to keep a some­what even spac­ing between geo­graph­i­cal areas, although a com­pletely even dis­tri­b­u­tion would have been, of course, impos­si­ble to realize.

Short/Long (pre­vi­ously enti­tled Quar­tet) (2005)

Instru­men­ta­tion: bass tbn, pno, perc, laptop
Dura­tion: 11’00
Per­form­ers: Bass Trom­bone – Scott Good, Piano – Stephanie Chua, Per­cus­sion – Mikael Heikkila, Com­puter – Aaron Ger­vais, Con­duc­tor – Bill Rowson
Pro­gramme Note

Two years’ dis­tance and fresh ears have made me decide to rename this piece, orginally called Quar­tet, to Short/Long. These are the titles of the two move­ments and reflect the kinds of artic­u­la­tions and phras­ing that I employed.

Texting and Driving (2007–2008)

Instru­men­ta­tion: gtr
Dura­tion: 9’00
Commissioned by Paul Bowman
mp3 listen to Texting and Driving — I
mp3 listen to Texting and Driving — II
mp3 listen to Texting and Driving — III
Per­form­ers: Guitar – Paul Bowman
Pro­gramme Note

Always on. Instan­ta­neous. No down time. Avail­able. Abbre­vi­ated. Abuse of excla­ma­tion marks. Multi-tasking. Frag­men­ta­tion. Ille­gal? Dan­ger­ous… In-the-moment. Mul­ti­ple direc­tions. Too many vari­ables to con­sider at once. Impa­tient. Faster. Abstrac­tion. Con­crete. Asphalt. Fol­low­ing dis­tance. Reaction time.

The Enslavement and Liberation of Oksana G. (2006)

Instru­men­ta­tion: sop, ten, bari, clar, perc, pno, vln, vc, cb
Dura­tion: 15’00
Com­mis­sioned by Tapes­try New Opera Works
Pro­gramme Note

I wrote this cham­ber opera for three singers and six instru­men­tal­ists in con­junc­tion with Colleen Mur­phy for Tapestry’s Opera To Go series. It tells the story of a young East­ern Euro­pean woman (Oksana) who has found her­self in the safe­house of an Ital­ian priest (Alessan­dro). She has escaped from a pimp (Kon­stan­tin), who tricked her into pros­ti­tu­tion, and now finds that she is falling in love with Alessan­dro. He in turn, despite his priestly call­ing, finds him­self tempted by Oksana. Dur­ing this scene, they dance around the com­pli­ca­tions of their sit­u­a­tion, each one afraid to reveal him– or her– self to the other. In addi­tion, another prob­lem presents itself at the end of the scene.

The Secret (2005)

Instru­men­ta­tion: sop, ten, pno
Dura­tion: 4’00
Libretto by Colleen Murphy, used by permission
Pro­gramme Note

This is the first work I did with Colleen Mur­phy, while we were par­tic­i­pat­ing in Tapestry’s LibLab in August 2005. The story is about a man who has had an acci­dent, and his unfaith­ful wife/girlfriend who acci­den­tally reveals her infi­delity as she tries to com­fort him.

Two Vignettes on Transition (2008)

Instru­men­ta­tion: orchestra
Dura­tion: 12’00
Pro­gramme Note

This piece deals with my inter­est in both tran­si­tional musi­cal mate­ri­als and the tran­si­tive nature of sound itself, which dis­ap­pears almost as soon as it is cre­ated. I have con­ceived the form of the piece as an explo­ration of tran­si­tion, pre­sent­ing numer­ous sounds in motion as they come into and out of exis­tence in time, and show­ing them from sev­eral per­spec­tives so as to allow the effects of time and tran­si­tion to change the very nature of the sounds and sug­gest new meanings.